DISTRICT

ED.VOICETHREAD FACTS

A walled garden, with beautiful views. Ed.VoiceThread is the perfect online environment for students to practice their communications skills online, yet in a controlled, accountable, and transparent setting.

iKeepSafe has certified Ed.VoiceThread's practices for the protection and privacy of student information.

Accountability and transparency. Students working within Ed.VoiceThread are protected by student-centered policies that ensure a safe and supportive environment:

Students cannot private message other students.

All student work is transparent to administrators and faculty within the school or district.

Student accounts can only interact with users that educators and administrators approve.

Custom tailored policies. Administrators can set global and individualized policies for students, enabling them to either restrict or give more freedom and autonomy, as age and local school policy dictates.

Those in multi-sensory environments always do better than those in unisensory environments. They have more recall with better resolution that lasts longer, evident even 20 years later.

— John Medina, author Brain Rules

Michael Fort of the Baltimore County Public Schools discusses the importance of intuitive design and how VoiceThread encourages student-centered learning and engagement.

RESEARCH

Over the last decade a great deal of research has been conducted on the impact of multi-sensory interaction on learning in general, and VoiceThread in particular. Below are abstracts and links to some of this research, and a more complete listing can be found here.

Abstract

This paper discusses how synchronizing Web 2.0 technologies, particularly by using VoiceThread, is able to help English speaking teachers to improve their formative feedback in the teaching of speaking skills. This study shows that the use of VoiceThread able to become one of the solutions to help teachers who want to provide specific, clear and accurate feedback on oral performance activities. This study is an action research, which involves six EFL learners at one of the universities in Indonesia. Before VoiceThread can contribute to improving teachers’ formative feedback, this study found that teachers need to do the following five matters, they are: (1) Making learners profile; (2) Making lesson plan; (3) Understanding formative feedback; (4) Determining assessment rubric, and (5) Implementing VoiceThread. Implementing VoiceThread is not only designed to help teachers improve their formative feedback, but also make their students able to notice and learn their teacher’s formative feedback afterward. To achieve these objectives, the result of this action research study indicates that giving formative feedback by using VoiceThread is worthwhile since it is a mechanism that combines the asynchronous learning and face-to-face. Thus, this can be considered as an action research on blended learning.

Abstract

The current study investigated the effects of the use of VoiceThread (VT) on the listening comprehension and attitudes of college students of Arabic as a foreign language. Thirty-five students in two 10-week classes of beginning Arabic participated in this study. The instruction in both classes was the same except that, for one group, the instruction was supplemented by the use of VT to enhance listening and speaking skills during the 10 weeks. Upon completion of the class, students using VT showed superior listening skills. Moreover, an Attitude and Engagement survey showed that the students enjoyed using VT and viewed it as a valuable tool that enhanced their language learning.

Abstract

A sense of belonging to a learning community has been identified as one of the factors contributing to greater student satisfaction and persistence in online education pro-grams. Using the community of inquiry framework as a theoretical guide, the purpose of this study was to explore the role of VoiceThread, a web-based platform that facilitates cloud communication, in creating a sense of community for U.S. adult learners in the online environment. This study surveyed 39 students in a College of Education fully online master’s program and in a blended doctoral program regarding their experiences using VoiceThread in their courses. Results indicate that students perceive VoiceThread positively in the creation of online community. Students reported feeling more connected their classmates due to the tool’s ability to add voice to online activities. Students also felt more connected to their instructor due to VoiceThread’s ability to humanize, or make the instructor seem real.

Abstract

This article describes a VoiceThread /FTC project carried out with advanced ESL students at the Virginia Tech Language and Culture Institute in the National Capital Region. This project is the culminating activity of a series of tasks created with the “backward design” approach in mind. Backward design is a method of designing educational curriculum by setting goals before choosing instructional methods and forms of assessment (Wiggins & McTighe). In this unit, the overarching goal is an oral presentation on Art, which will be recorded by the students using VoiceThread.

Abstract

This case study presents how VoiceThread, an online application used to create multimedia presentations and conversations, was used to enable first year students to give and receive feedback. In the process, the presentation skills of the student are enhanced.

Abstract

The movement to advance the clinical nurse leader (CNL) as an innovative new role for meeting higher health care quality standards continues with CNL programs offered on-line at colleges and universities nationwide. Collaborative learning activities offer the opportunity for CNL students to gain experience in working together in small groups to negotiate and solve care process problems. The challenge for nurse educators is to provide collaborative learning activities in an asynchronous learning environment that can be considered isolating by default. This article reports on the experiences of 17 CNL students who used VoiceThread, a cloud-based tool that allowed them to communicate asynchronously with one another through voice comments for collaboration and sharing knowledge. Participants identified benefits and drawbacks to using VoiceThread for collaboration as compared to text-based discussion boards. Students reported that the ability to hear the voice of their peers and the instructor helped them feel like they were in a classroom communicating with “real” instructor and peers. Students indicated a preference for on-line classes that used VoiceThread discussions to on-line classes that used only text-based discussion boards.

Abstract

Asynchronous discussions are often utilized in online courses to provide a venue for students to openly communicate and build shared understanding, and for instructors to skillfully facilitate the process. While discussions can be invaluable toward creating and sustaining an online community of inquiry (CoI), they are not effective if not optimally designed. It is the authors’ position that it is helpful to identify research-proven online discussion strategies and conceptualize them into the CoI framework, which has been extensively studied and validated. This framework posits that there are three interrelated presences – social, cognitive, and teaching – that must be perceived by members in order to facilitate a successful educational experience. Classifying strategies within this framework may guide instructors to purposefully select and employ methods that encourage productive, efficient, and meaningful discussions. Strategies, such as providing prompt but modest feedback, peer facilitation, protocol discussion prompts, and providing audio feedback, were found to support multiple presences in a review of the literature. Based on these findings, it is argued that educators need to employ discussion strategies that integrate all three presences in order to support an effective online CoI.